All the Young Men

by Ruth Coker Burks

  As the movie played on, I got sadder. It felt like I went to two funerals a week throughout the state. It got so I was so sick of hearing “Wind beneath My Wings” playing at every funeral. I would get hopeful when there wouldn’t be any for a week or two. But there were always more. Some of them were in Little Rock, and some were in other places, and I had only talked to them over the phone when I told them to bring home whatever medications and medical records they needed from wherever it was they were coming from. Some of those guys didn’t even live long enough for me to drive over to see them. Or sometimes they would simply show up, ashes in a box.

  I was coming up on five years of manning the fort. Naively thinking I was just keeping the fort going until the cavalry came.

  Dolly gave birth, and the baby tested positive for an alphabet soup of acronyms. As far as I knew, he was born with antibodies for HIV but then tested negative at six months. It was a miracle. The baby ended up living with Dolly’s mother and her sister, who was only about six months older than him. His grandmother was able to breastfeed him to keep his immunity up.

  I lost touch with Dolly, but I knew she would borrow the baby, because an organization was taking her around to the churches for a dog and pony show. They bought a sundress for her and a sailor suit for the innocent baby. She would tell her story, and the organization would get tons of money thrown at them, helping this poor, infected woman and her baby.

  Then she started hooking again, so they dumped her. Can’t have an active hooker going to churches. She might recognize a john in the pews, I guess.

  The last time I saw Dolly was at the mall, the same one where Billy worked at the clothing store. She was walking slowly with some other women and was dressed in a catsuit.

  “Hi, Dolly,” I said. Up close, she was skeletal. So far gone she blinked at me to figure out who I was.

  “Ruth,” she said, like she was pinning a name to something almost forgotten. There was a sparkle for a second in her hazel eyes, which looked even bigger for the gauntness of her face.

  I wanted to help her.

  “How’s your little boy?” I said. She looked over my shoulder at a man who slowed as he walked by.

  “Not sure right now,” she said. “You have a nice night.”

  “You too,” I said. “You know where I am, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I never saw her again.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I had to park a little down the street from Billy and Paul’s house because there were so many cars. As Allison and I got out, I was again shocked that such a movie star could live in a cute little house on Oak Cliff. Paul had invited me to their 1990 Christmas party, and it was just a few days short of the actual holiday. It had snowed an inch, and Allison crunched a design with her shoes along the path to the house. I’d made a sweet potato pie they could either keep or put out. It was still warm. I wasn’t sure what kind of party it was, but I’d said yes as soon as Paul asked me.

  There were so many people inside, mostly men, and I went straight to the kitchen and left the pie next to a tray of cookies and chips. I handed Allison a couple of Oreos and then went to find Paul. He was in the living room getting the music going on the record player. He had a whole stack of records in a crate ready to play for everyone. “The soundtrack to the night,” I said.

  “Something like that,” he said. “I’m so glad you could come.”

  “Thank you for inviting me,” I said. “This is Allison.”

  “Merry Christmas, Allison,” he said.

  “I like your tree,” she said.

  He turned to look at it, charmed by her. Their Christmas tree was sweet, positioned in the front window for all to see. It had the collected ornaments of a relationship, red bows tied to the ends of branches, and a red angel on top smiling down at us. There were presents under the tree, which I caught Allison eyeing. I looked around and saw butterflies above the window, little gold sculptures or drawings of them in small frames.

  I heard a laugh and knew it was Billy before I even turned around. He wore a light blue sweatshirt with an ornate white snowflake edged in gold. He was holding court, people all around him. Mother Superior was across the room, watching some sort of Christmas on Ice special on TV, and I remembered that he lived upstairs. He was wearing a dark blue turtleneck that stretched across his frame. It was exciting for me to see everyone outside the bar. Allison gravitated to the TV, lured in by the skaters in their short princess dresses.

  We watched, but the real draw was Mother’s running commentary. Allison loved it, and Mother loved a new audience. After a while, I turned to look back at Billy and saw him slipping out the front door.

  “I’ll be right back, okay?” I told Allison.

  “Okay,” she said, entranced by the TV.

  Billy was smoking on the porch out front, looking up at the stars. I didn’t realize how loud it was inside. “Am I interrupting a quiet moment?” I asked. I could hear Wham!’s “Last Christmas” starting inside.

  He blew out a puff of smoke. “I don’t like quiet moments,” he said, offering me a cigarette from his pack.

  “No, thank you,” I said. “I only came out for some air.”

  “Do you believe this sky?” he said. Even with just a crescent moon, the snow on the ground reflected light back into the night sky, a dark purple blue with the detailed brushwork of white clouds. I could make out the details of every last branch on the sweetgum tree in the front yard and every angle of Billy’s face in profile. He’d turned twenty-two a couple of weeks before.

  “Imagine if it was a full moon,” I said.

  He took a drag on his cigarette and exhaled. “Why ask for the moon?” he said dreamily, in a voice lighter than his own. “We have the stars.”

  “Is that—”

  “Bette Davis,” he said. “Now, Voyager.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I’ve loved movies since I was a kid. I could go whole days repeating dialogue, and nobody really noticed I was living in a black-and-white movie.”

  “I picture you running from Dardanelle,” I said.

  He exhaled smoke, and his answer was that laugh of his, sent up to that bright sky. It echoed in the cold, and he covered his mouth quick. I tried to imagine him in Dardanelle, going to the one barbershop in its tiny downtown. I remembered all the times I’d escaped my mother. “When I was little, my place was the woods,” I said. “I had a bike, and I was the queen of the woods.”

  “I’d take my bike to the sandbar,” he said. “Take off on my banana seat, with the little wheels, right to the edge of the river to look out as whoever I was that minute: Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe . . .”

  “Your family Pentecostal?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Most of the guys I help were raised Pentecostal,” I said. “I don’t know why. Pentecostals, you’re just out the door, so maybe that’s why. I’m where they land.”

  “What got you into this?”

  “Well, Paul invited me to this party.”

  “You’re funny,” he said. “No, helping people with AIDS.”

  I told him about Jimmy and about those first thirteen hours. “I don’t know,” I said. “There was a need. They kept coming. Now I’m trying to focus on people getting tested so we can at least put off people getting to that point.”

  He was quiet for a minute—so long, I almost filled the space with some compliment about his last show. I had them to give. He asked quietly, “What’s it like when they die?”

  “We all die different,” I said. “Yet the same. You know, this is gonna sound weird: I can see Death. It’s like she’s a human but an angel, who comes and waits with me. She’s become a friend.” I stopped myself, embarrassed I’d been so open. “I’ve never told anyone that, but it’s true. I know I sound crazy.”

  “I don’t think you sound crazy,�
�� he said, looking right at me. I could tell he wanted to say something. Instead, he stubbed out his cigarette and hugged me. It was a surprise. I felt a quickening in my heart, then an ease. Like falling into the same rhythm.

  We went back inside, and Allison and I stayed past her bedtime, listening to all the men swapping stories. The subject always returned to Billy. How he’d shown up in Hot Springs and jumped the line in the drag circuit, winning Miss Hot Springs and then Miss Discovery in Little Rock. He had been heading for the Miss Arkansas crown.

  Paul took over: “Then Steve and Violet—” He turned to me and Allison. “Violet was my ex-boyfriend Kenneth, a beautiful queen. Anyways, they had moved to Texarkana, and Steve was managing a Twelve-Dollar Store. You know, where everything cost twelve dollars.”

  “He called Paul,” said Billy, “and told him, ‘I’ve got perfect sportswear for Billy. The Contemporary Fashion category. You’ve gotta see it.’”

  Paul took the conversation like a relay baton. “I said, ‘At the Twelve-Dollar Store?’ He said. ‘Yes, it’s color-blocked, a new thing that came in.’ They got clothes from overstock places, so a lot of the stuff was expensive, but they sold it cheap.”

  “I was skeptical,” said Billy.

  “But we went down there, and we loved it,” said Paul. “This black-and-white, color-blocked dress that was so beyond what everyone else was wearing.”

  “I ordered a dark black wig and had a little whalebone thing in the back, so it kind of poofed up here,” Billy said.

  Paul beamed. “He came out, and he just looked like a million dollars. All the Little Rock queens that were, like, stuck on themselves­—­‘I’m gonna win Miss Arkansas and be Miss America’—they were all stunned. You could hear them inhale.”

  Billy made it to Miss Arkansas, “and no Hot Springs queen had won in twenty years,” said Paul. “And the crowd loved him, of course.”

  “Of course,” said Billy, looking right at Allison, who grinned back at him.

  Paul put his hand on Billy’s knee. “I remember we were sittin’ there, and they called out the preliminary winners of the awards. And we knew he’d do good, but we didn’t realize how good.” His voice took on that of the pageant announcer. “‘The winner of Male Interview: Marilyn Morrell.’ Everybody was screaming and hollering, because it shows the audience, not only is this a pretty queen, but he’s smart. Then they’re like, ‘Contemporary Fashion: Marilyn Morrell.’ And ‘Evening Gown: Marilyn Morrell.’ He won every cate­gory except for Talent.”

  Billy frowned, and we pretended to be shocked. Paul continued: “And the judge that judged the queen that won higher in talent did it just enough to knock Billy down to first runner-up? Well he was the show director from the bar in Louisiana where the winner was from before she moved to Little Rock.”

  We leaned back and shook our heads. Even Allison seemed to know what it meant.

  Paul continued: “Which, I’m not saying it was rigged, but I’m just saying. The cards didn’t fall right.”

  Billy lifted his chin. “I carried on.”

  “Miss Congeniality,” I said.

  He smiled. “Always.”

  After that night, Billy would tell me when he was going to be at the bar and ask me to bring Allison by. I couldn’t bring her inside, for fear Our House would lose its license, and I would lose her, but I would drive around back to the stage door. Billy would come out, sometimes half in drag, sometimes fully, to say hi to her. Allison would open the car door, and Billy would kiss her cheek, ask how school was. The other queens would follow Billy out, and soon everyone treated Allison and me as family. If Our House was closed, I could bring Allison by to see Paul. Even Twyman, the owner, who could be so crusty, was nice to her. If he wasn’t there, Paul would give the claw arcade machine a shake so Allison could get a prize.

  There wasn’t a Mrs. Doubtfire nanny type among them, but they would come through when I needed them to. If I was at a hospital holding someone’s hand and couldn’t get away to pick up Allison at school, I could call around until someone was free to run over and pick her up. I had gay men and lesbians lining up with all the stay-at-home moms in station wagons at St. John the Baptist Catholic School, and I can only imagine what people thought.

  Billy and I began meeting at the Wyatt’s Cafeteria in the mall during his lunch hour. Not so routine that it was an everyday thing, but enough that it became our thing. Hot Springs Mall was close to everything, so I could just stop in, and the food at Wyatt’s was really good. Billy and I went down the line with our trays, and these bored people would dish out the offerings. “Chicken-fried steak,” they’d say. “A dollar ten.” We’d both get that and the mashed potatoes, so their next question was about the gravy: “Brown or white?” The right choice was brown, and that’s what we got. Billy always gave the person an encouraging smile as they first dipped the ladle in the potatoes to make a bird’s nest, then filled it with the gravy. Where we diverged was that I went for the green beans, while he chose corn. Billy would say his requests as if this was a play the audience was seeing for the first time, an actor repeating the same lines with a spontaneity that contrasted with the listless delivery of the servers.

  We’d try to sit in the window that looked out on the mall so Billy could see and be seen. It was fun to look at the people with bags and guess what they bought.

  “This one, Ruthie,” he said, admiring a woman carrying two huge Dillard’s bags. “Sisters are doin’ it for themselves.”

  “Working girl,” I said. “She got that promotion, and now she’s gonna show them how it’s done.”

  When a man turned to look at the woman’s rear end, Billy and I were mad for her. “Acting sly like you even have a chance, sir,” he said. “All that Just for Men seeping into your brain.”

  We’d laugh right on the edge of loud, enough that people looked at us. Billy and I never ran out of things to talk about, but the routine at Wyatt’s did get boring. Work gave him an hour for lunch, so I asked him if he ever wanted to break out of the mall and go eat someplace else. You couldn’t beat the prices at Wyatt’s, and we didn’t have the money to eat at nice places. That left McDonald’s, which didn’t seem worth the trip. The next time I was planning to make a lot of food for my guys, I offered to make us a picnic lunch to have at the lake. It was so close that I could pick Billy up and take him back after we ate.

  I packed my fried chicken, along with some rolls and potato salad. I brought my favorite quilt, an old family one on the edge of being raggedy. He was outside waiting for me and ran up to my car before I could even park. I remember the graceful way he looked both ways and how he jumped in like I was driving a getaway car.

  With the windows down, we drove out to the point on Lake Hamilton. This had once been the property of my mother’s family, before she sold it to a resort. It was my playground before my daddy died and the place I would escape to after. Now the resort had taken the wildness out of it, and a grouping of teenage pines was what was left of my forest. They’d built a lovely dock, and I led Billy out to the very edge to set down our picnic. He kept looking back, because it felt sneaky to Billy, going out on a dock where he didn’t think we were supposed to be. He was waiting for someone to yell at us.

  He calmed down once I unfurled the quilt for us. Billy gasped at its beauty, and I smiled. It was my mother’s and had a three-inch Tiffany-blue turquoise border, bright red X’s, and hand-stitched triangles and squares of fabric scraps—dishrags and worn dresses given an elegant new life. I had so many quilts folded up at home, but this was my favorite one to use outside.

  “I take this to the beach, and people scold me because it’s too nice,” I said.

  “It’s too nice not to use,” Billy said.

  “Right?” I answered.

  “I’d be mad if I had to spend my life in some cupboard.”

  We sat down and started our feast, and I stole a look
at him as he swooned at the first bite of the fried chicken. Boats floated by as we did our usual thing, talking about absolutely everything and nothing in the same conversation. At one point some fish broke water; I had the muscle memory my daddy left me with—the urge to grab a fishing pole with a spoon lure to get the bigger, smarter fish that were always swimming deep beneath that frenzy splashing on the surface. But they left as quick as they came.

  When we ran out of things to talk about, Billy traced the outline of square after square on the quilt, smoothing his hand over each one. I’d look down and tell him whose it was. I was there at its creation and remembered my mother and a group of women with the big quilting hoop in the middle of our old living room.

  “And now here we are,” I said, “all these years later.”

  “Here we are.”

  Other than that, we didn’t talk about our childhoods. I think we much preferred our shared present to our pasts. We talked about Mitch and Paul, and Billy spoke with such pride in his voice. Twice he mentioned that Paul was so busy because he managed the bar, and I realized Billy felt that being the bar manager’s main squeeze gave him a lot of clout. As if he needed any more. But really what he loved was the sureness of Paul. “If he says he’s going to do something,” Billy said, “he does it.”

  “They still make men like that?” I joked. “Well.”

  We met like this again and again, getting to know each other more each time we hung out. Sometimes we didn’t even need to talk much, just feel the warm sun on our faces. Billy always thought he needed a little color, and so did I. If I had a pen handy, and I always did, he would draw a self-portrait for me. They were beautiful pictures of him in drag, his face half-covered by a hat, a dark veil, or a cascade of long hair. Just enough mystery that he didn’t fully commit himself to being captured there on paper. I kept them, sometimes putting one up on the fridge for Allison to see too.